Student robots competing at WPI getting smarter and smarter

He's spent much of this year "listening" to a robot, and figuring out how to make it better.

Mr. Dimitrov is the leader of team AERO, one of two local groups that will be among the 18 to participate in NASA's third annual Sample Return Robot Challenge Wednesday through Friday at WPI.

The goal of the event, one of NASA's Centennial Challenges, is to design and develop robots capable of exploring landscapes in space without human control. The mission of the SRRC is for autonomous robots to find and retrieve items laid out in the grass at Institute Park. In Level 1, robots have 30 minutes to locate and retrieve one easily defined object (like a tennis ball). In Level 2, robots have two hours to retrieve objects across various levels of difficulty ("a red object of a certain size" or "a metallic object of some sort").

The contest carries a $1.5 million purse. Last year, only one team completed Level 1 — but on a second try, so that team did not advance to Level 2. Of the 18 new and returning teams this year, 14 are competing for money, with the other four (one WPI team and three foreign teams) participating as "demo" teams.

AERO stands for Autonomous Exploration Robot, and is a product of work being done by Mr. Dimitrov, a Ph.D. candidate in robotics engineering, and others in the RIVeR (Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research) Lab at WPI.

To the untrained eye, AERO may appear as a tangle of brightly colored wires on wheels, but this robot is indeed a carefully crafted collaborative effort of Mr. Dimitrov and teammates Supreeth Krishna Rao, Mitchell Wills and Samir Zutshi, with Taskin Padir, head of RIVeR Lab, serving as adviser. This will be AERO's second year participating in the challenge. Three of the team members are current WPI students; Mr. Zutshi is a graduate.

What may not be evident from looking at AERO is the sheer cost. Mr. Dimitrov estimates the equipment alone has cost from $130,000 to $140,000. The team has not actually spent this, however, as it receives both corporate sponsorship and support from WPI.

Last year, the team's focus was on hardware. They purchased the base for their robot in January 2013 and spent the next few months just building and making modifications. This year, they've put more of a focus on navigation and object detection software.

Mr. Dimitrov, a self-described tinkerer, said he knew early on he would be an engineer.

"I went to school thinking I wanted to be a mechanical engineer," he said. But he discovered he didn't care for the study of statics (non-moving objects) and switched to electrical engineering. He took a robotics course during his junior year, and was hooked.

Mr. Rao traced his passion for space exploration to toddlerhood, when his mother would show him the moon.

"I asked her, 'How do you go there?'

"It intrigues me when I look at the night sky," he continued. Something about it makes him keenly aware of the thin line between philosophy and science.

Mr. Rao describes Mr. Dimitrov as a strong leader who has an exceptional ability to see the big picture.

Humans, Mr. Dimitrov said, can look at a scene and immediately dissect it. But it's hard for robots to do even a slight version of that. How do you make a robot understand, for example, what is a desired sample vs. an unwanted object vs. a shadow?

"What we've been doing is basically showing the robot a bunch of images saying, 'This is an object you want to pick up,' and you give it 3,000 images of that object and basically teach the robot to recognize the object."

Team Formicarum, the other local team, is composed of three WPI graduates. Leader Marcus Menghini said his team signed up for the challenge "almost literally at the last possible moment" after a team for which he was being vetted failed to materialize.

So he, Alex Camilo and Kevin Harrington, who met in a local hackerspace called Technocopia, decided to put a team together. Because they are not current WPI students or employees, they are eligible to compete for prize money.

Mr. Menghini spends his days as a system engineer at Raytheon; his teammates, for now, are focusing their efforts on Technocopia.

With only five months to build their robot, they haven't necessarily been able to devote as much time to programming as they would like.

Unlike team AERO, Formicarum, which is Latin for "swarm of ants," will utilize several robots working together in what is known as a "swarm."

The team's initial plan was to have several small and partly capable robots, but that has evolved to four rovers that are larger and, hopefully, more capable.

"We actually know within about 10 feet where the Level 1 sample is going to be," Mr. Menghini explained, "and the rovers will fan out in that direction."

Formicarum did not have luck securing corporate sponsors this year, so Mr. Menghini and his father have provided the funding.

"The main point of the competition is to have this navigation stuff working," said Mr. Menghini, pointing out that navigational tools such as GPS (no GPS in space) and compasses (no magnetic field in space) are not allowed in the competition.

Mr. Padir at WPI emphasized that NASA's Centennial Challenges are open to any "citizen scientists."

"They (NASA) really want to reach out to anyone who might bring any piece of technology. It doesn't have to be ready for space," he said.

On Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., WPI will host TouchTomorrow, a festival of science, technology and robots in celebration of the Sample Return Robot Challenge. This free, family-friendly event will feature a wide array of interactive exhibits and activities by WPI, NASA the EcoTarium, the Worcester Historical Museum, WGBH and more. An awards ceremony for the SRRC will be held at 10 a.m. on the WPI quadrangle. For more information, visit touchtomorrow.wpi.edu.